So, rattle off a few you've read in the last yr., besides Thomas Frank, Chuck. Only book I can recall you've read on one of your infoshop webpgs. is, "Seeing like a State, " by James C. Scott.
How about, some you knew you'd disagree with too.
If you wrote the below, correct the spelling on Cohn-Bendit and obselete. http://www.google.com/search?q=Thinking+like+a+State+james+scott+infoshop
The implications of this model can be draw from Victor Serge's comments from 1919. As he put it, the party "is in a sense the nervous system of the class. Simultaneously the consciousness and the active, physical organisation of the dispersed forces of the proletariat, which are often ignorant of themselves and often remain latent or express themselves contradictorily." And the masses, what is their role? Well, the party is "supported by the entire working population," although, strangely enough, "it maintains its unique situation in dictatorial fashion." He admits "the energies which have just triumphed . . . exist outside" the party and that "they constitute its strength only because it represents them knowingly." Thus the workers are "[b]ehind" the communists, "sympathising instinctively with the party and carrying out the menial tasks required by the revolution." [Revolution in Danger, p. 67, p. 66 and p. 6] Can we be surprised that the workers have the "menial tasks" to perform when the party is the conscious element? Equally, can we be surprised that this situation is maintained "in dictatorial fashion"? It was precisely this kind of social division of labour between manual and mental labour which helped cause the Russian revolution in the first place!
As the Cohen-Bendit brothers argue, the "Leninist belief that the workers cannot spontaneously go beyond the level of trade union consciousness is tantamount to beheading the proletariat, and then insinuating the Party as the head . . . Lenin was wrong, and in fact, in Russia the Party was forced to decapitate the workers' movement with the help of the political police and the Red Army under the brilliant leadership of Trotsky and Lenin." [Obsolute Communism, pp. 194-5]
As well as explaining the subsequent embrace of party dictatorship over the working class, vanguardism also explains the notorious inefficiency of Leninist parties faced with revolutionary situations we discuss in section H.5.8. After all, basing themselves on the perspective that all spontaneous movements are inherently bourgeois they could not help but be opposed to autonomous class struggle and the organisations and tactics it generates. James C. Scott, in his excellent discussion of the roots and flaws in Lenin's ideas on the party, makes the obvious point that since, for Lenin, "authentic, revolutionary class consciousness could never develop autonomously within the working class, it followed that that the actual political outlook of workers was always a threat to the vanguard party." [Seeing like a State, p. 155] As Maurice Brinton argues, the "Bolshevik cadres saw their role as the leadership of the revolution. Any movement not initiated by them or independent of their control could only evoke their suspicion." These developments, of course, did not occur by chance or accidentally. As Brinton notes, "a given ideological premise (the preordained hegemony of the Party) led necessarily to certain conclusions in practice." [The Bolsheviks and Workers' Control, p. xi and p. xii]
Bakunin expressed the implications of the vanguardist perspective extremely well. It is worthwhile quoting him at length:
"Idealists of all sorts, metaphysicians, positivists, those who uphold the priority of science over life, the doctrinaire revolutionists -- all of them champion with equal zeal although differing in their argumentation, the idea of the State and State power, seeing in them, quite logically from their point of view, the only salvation of society. Quite logically, I say, having take as their basis the tenet -- a fallacious tenet in our opinion -- that thought is prior to life, and abstract theory is prior to social practice, and that therefore sociological science must become the starting point for social upheavals and social reconstruction -- they necessarily arrived at the conclusion that since thought, theory, and science are, for the present at least, the property of only a very few people, those few should direct social life; and that on the morrow of the Revolution the new social organisation should be set up not by the free integration of workers' associations, villages, communes, and regions from below upward, conforming to the needs and instincts of the people, but solely by the dictatorial power of this learned minority, allegedly expressing the general will of the people." [The Political Philosophy of Bakunin, pp. 283-4]
-- Michael Pugliese